Ivelet

The music of the dales was hymns, brass and silver bands and cowboy music.

Brothers Chris and Arnold Alderson would sing to their brown-and-white short-horn cows as they milked them by hand in the midge ridden byre next to my grandmother's house. The songs would be Jim Reeves and Gene Autry. “A four legged frind, a four legged frind; he’ll never let you down”  and “I’ll forgit many things in my lifetime, but my Darlin’ I won’t forgit yew.”

Looking towards Satron from Ivelet.

The Aldersons rented a small house and farm in Ivelet from Lord Peel. No-one in Ivelet had electricity so cooking was done on a cast-iron range and water for the tin bath was boiled up in a cauldron or pot over the fire. After Mrs Alderson died, baths became a real rarity for Mosser, Chris and Arnold. The fire was always lit and the door was almost always open.

Hay time. Looking towards Ivelet. 

My first memory of Ivelet was of summertime when the Aldersons were harvesting hay in the small patchwork of fields that they rented. Chris and Arnold had cut the grass with scythes and with a green petrol-powered Allen Mower that had two wheels and a reciprocating blade. They cut every hillock and hollow and worked right into the corner of each field where a tractor could never heave reached, even if they had one. Hay had to be made while the sun shone, so family and neighbours were enlisted to turn the hay with pitchforks and rakes so that it could be stored in the stone barn or cowhouse before the next band of rain swept in from the fells. When the hay was dry enough to be gathered, it was forked onto a wooden sled that was pulled by a patient old horse called Robin. My job was to sit on Robin's back and hold onto his padded leather collar while he marched along slowly so that the sled could be piled high without stopping every few minutes. When we reached the barn, the hay was pitched up into the loft with long-handled two-pronged forks to be fed to the stock in the coming winter. A few years later I would have the same job pulling the same sled but using a little grey Ferguson tractor instead of the horse. When he died, Robin had a whole field and a barn named after him.

What remains of the Allen mower.

In the 1950s as today, Ivelet was dominated by the big house at Gunnerside Lodge. It was owned by Lord Peel and mostly unoccupied until August each year when the grouse shoot started. During one shoot, Sir Robert was handed a shotgun by his loader and it went off. He literally shot himself in the foot. As a result, the moor-tracks were littered with stone mounting blocks so that he could get on and off his horse near the shooting butts. When he died, his son William, who is the same age as me, moved into the Lodge as his family home.

Apart from the farm house, the hamlet included a few old stone buildings associated with the farm and six other homes. The best house belonged to Mr and Mrs Clucas. The front of the house boasted an oak doorway and a small stained-glass window depicting a fly-fisherman, who reminded me of the famous Mr. Crabtree. The rear had a large terrace that overlooked the Swale and the hills beyond. 

The second best house belonged to the estate and provided a home of the head keeper, Jimmy Wilson and his family, as well as kennels for dogs. Edgar Tissiman was the head gardener and later a National Park Warden. He lived with his wife in the cottage next to the farm. Edgar was a fine fisherman and a great walker. He once showed me his service revolver but I never thought to ask him which army he was in.

The fisherman window.

Tucked in behind the farm was a tiny cottage that was occupied by Jane Mary, who was also an Alderson. The living room was like something from a history book with a stone floor, a black-painted cast-iron range, simple wooden furniture and some stuffed birds that I really fancied. One was an owl and the other a pheasant. Old Jane Mary dressed like a Victorian (which she was, really) with a long dark woollen dress, a white apron and clogs. We really liked her a lot and we adored her Swaledale shortbread biscuits. The only other Ivelet residents in the 1950s were my Gran and Mr and Mrs Hope who later moved to Rampsholme near Muker.

The house on the corner belonged to Mrs. Pescod, my grandmother. It was a traditional Dales stone cottage, built in 1602 into the slope of the hill. The cool stone-shelved pantry and the coal hole in the back were practically underground. When we looked out of the small pantry window we were on eye level with the sheep in the back field. There was a small dark kitchen area with a sink. Water came from a spring up on the pasture above and occasionally, after a good shower of rain, frogspawn or even tadpoles would come through the tap. Once, in a drought period, the pipe became blocked when a mouse crawled into it and died.

The white-washed sitting room was rather smart with black beams, imposing black oak furniture, a sofa and a few paintings. Uncle John kept his ancient fly rod and reel along one of the beams. It had belonged to a Colonel Greenwell and probably our great grandfather before John had it. My brother Alex has it now. A black china teapot held a tangle of small fishing flies tied to cat gut. The patterns were Greenwells glory, snipe-and-purple, partridge-and-orange and March brown.

My favourite view in the
whole world.

The sitting room wasn’t used very much because the heart of the house was the living room with it's vast cast-iron range, an overhead drying rack and various hooks for hanging things like hams. Despite the lack of electricity there was always a battery powered radio with a big yellow dial on it naming all of the stations we could possibly reach if we were on top of a hill rather than deep in a valley. We usually managed to get the BBC Home Service and the Light Programme and that was enough to set me off on a lifetime love affair with radio.

The walls were a yard thick and set with sash windows that framed my favourite view in the whole world. I would sit in the recess with my knees up to my chin and trace the raindrops racing down the glass. The whole south side of the valley was laid out like a diorama. Looking out across the tall alder and ash-trees that marked the river banks I scanned the steep hillside. The tumbling course of Oxnop Beck was lined with smaller trees that crowded low over the narrow stream before giving up to the sheep-shawn moorland and the bare crags beyond. There were farms over there at Crowtrees, High Oxnop and Hill Top. Gran knew all the people who lived in those stone houses and we would check the chimneys to see if their fires were lit, which meant that all was fine within. The hill was netted with dry-stone walls that retained sheep on the higher ground and cattle on the lower ground. We could watch the animals being herded or moved by the farm dogs or we could scan the valley road to see if the Percival's bus, the postman, the dairy lorry, the mobile shop, the library van, the butcher or the fish van was on the move.

On this rainy day, I was peering at the hillside in a search for rushing gutters of white water which signified that good fishing days lay ahead as the river would be in flood. This was the signal for me to go into the walled garden and turn it over with a fork to find worms which went into a moss-lined coffee tin or a jam-jar.  I puncture the lid with Gran's tin opener, or the meat fork, which explained its splayed prongs. Later, when the rain eased off, my brother and I would join Mosser and Arnold Alderson on the river bank with our rods set up and baited with a worm on a hook and a few lead shot about a foot above that. The ideal spot to find trout in a flood was in an eddy, under the bank, out of the current where many trout would take refuge until the flood eased off and the water clarity improved. Vast clouds of biting midges tested our patience and our stamina. Our faces and hands would be blotched and burning but we would never give up without a few trout to carry home in the old wicker creel.

On most days the Swale looks like it is made of black coffee due to peat staining from the head of the Dale, but in full spate it turns a muddy brown, like builder's tea. There are standing waves that hold over submerged rocks and whole trees float past. The stones of the river bed tumble downstream producing an unforgettable range of noises that are distorted by the torrent. Afterwards the old pools and rapids would be changed, but they are always in the same places because the river descends in a series of steps composed of shelves of flat slippery limestone that allow the stones to be washed away to accumulate in a chaotic flow below them where the stream gets braided into numerous channels as it finds its way through. Tufts of grass and discarded animal feed bags would mark the height of the flood in the branches of the riverside alders.

Playing among the stones at Thurley field.

Playing among the beck-stones filled endless summer days, as it had for every generation before us.  We made boats and submarines from old chair-legs, cotton-reels and bits of scrap wood, ballasted with spanners, bolts or anything heavy we could find.

Alex and I would dam up the small detours that the rivulets made, or we would create holding ponds for small fish like loach and bullheads that we would catch with our hands. Later Uncle John would teach us to tickle trout out of the pools, but I never lost my fascination for all the little fish and the caddis and mayfly nymphs that lived under the stones.

Alex took a lot of interest in the stones themselves, finding minerals and fossils among the limestones and shales and piecing together the story of the landscape we grew up in.